Juan Cole

Muqtada al-Sadr Condemns Interim Governing Council: “As bad as Saddam” The young Shiite clerical leader Muqtada al-Sadr lashed out at the US-appointed Interim Governing Council on Friday, according to AP. He said that the new regime is not much different from that run by Saddam. Muqtada was in large part referring to the plans by […]

Lack of Medicines for Chronic Diseases The interim Iraqi health ministry has contacted pharmaceutical companies worldwide, urgently seeking medicines to treat chronic diseases. The ministry lacks many such medicines in its storehouses. (al-Sharq al-Awsat)

Elections in Tikrit In an apparent reversal of Paul Bremer’s opposition to municipal elections, Tikrit elected a city council on Thursday. Apparently in the absence of voter registration roles, authorities granted each known household in the municipality one vote. (This procedure would have resulted in a largely middle aged and elderly male electorate, since the […]

Guerrillas set off a bomb in Fallujah on Thursday, wounding a US paratrooper. Guerrillas set off a bomb near a pipeline in northern Iraq, killing two Iraqi Civil Defense Corps members. 10 others were wounded. The 101st Airborne Division engaged in a firefight with guerrillas, killing two and injuring another. A car packed with explosives […]

The Iraqi interim Interior Ministry announced that it has hired 1000 school guards to prevent the kidnapping of children and the holding of them for ranson. Lack of security has discouraged some families from sending children to school, especially girls. There has been a wave of such kidnappings in the past few months.

British representative in Iraq Jeremy Greenstock complained Thursday about Iran-backed Shiite militias in Iraq. He warned Iran to cease using them to interfere. He named the Badr Corps of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iran as “harmful” and as posing a threat to Coalition troops. SCIRI had announced that the Badr Corps would […]

Pessimistic Rumsfeld Memo Leaked Donald Rumsfeld sent a memo to four of his associates in the Department of Defense on October 16 that worried about how the US is doing in the war on terror. He admitted that there was little in the way of a measurement for progress, but worried that the US had […]

Guerrillas Kill 2 US troops, wound 10 Guerrillas killed two US troops at Kirkuk on Wednesday, according to al-Sharq al-Awsat; this report was not confirmed at press time by the US military. The paper also reported three US troops wounded at a Kurdish village, Laylan, near Kirkuk.. Guerrillas wounded 2 US soldiers in Baghdad with […]

Firefight in Najaf A group of armed men attacked the Najaf headquarters of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq at midnight Tues.-Weds. Four of six assailants were apprehened, and a spokseman for SCIRI said that they admitted to being Saddam loyalists. It was alleged in September that Baathists attempted to assassinate Ayatollah Hussein […]